Culture - Commonness of the Common?

Summary: There is something wrong or at least discordant
in the formulation of our Conference topic. Isn't it a little
bit contradictory to ask for the unifying aspects of cultures
(cultural aspects that unify - what?) instead of asking for a
culture(s) unifying its own aspects? The problematic point is
the notion of culture. Our understanding of it today is the real
question. It is not answerable directly because of the multiplicity
and diversity of cultural phenomena. The complex and dynamic
relationships between and among them are not conceptually reducible.
The word "culture" is completely worn out. It does
not mean what it is saying and does not say what it means. It
is too large in its significance and to narrow in its own use.
We really do not understand what is the commonness of the
common neither do we have a unifying vision of it.

1. The life of mind

The commons, which once were considered the basis of the concept
of the public, are expropriated for private use and no one can
lift a finger, say the authors of Empire. The public is
thus dissolved, privatized, even as a concept. Or really, the
immanent relation between the public and the common is replaced
by the transcendent power of private property (Hardt/Negri 2001:
301).

What is the operative notion of the common today? - Hardt &
Negri ask.

It seems to them that today we participate in a more radical
and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the
history of capitalism.

We participate in a productive world made up of communication
and social networks, interactive services, and common languages;
our economic and social reality is defined less by the material
objects that are produced and consumed than by co-produced services
and relationships. Producing increasingly means constructing co-operation
and communicative commonalities (ibid. 302).

The concept of private property itself becomes increasingly
nonsensical. There are ever fewer goods that can be possessed
and used as the exclusive right that derives from their possession,
Hardt & Negri argue. It is community that produces and that,
while producing, is reproduced and redefined.

But the conceptual crisis of private property does not become
a crisis in practice, and instead the regime of private expropriation
has tended to be applied universally.

Nevertheless, they think, in the context of linguistic and
co-operative production, labor and the common property tend to
overlap. Private property, despite its juridical powers, cannot
help becoming an ever more abstract and transcendental concept.

Following Deleuze & Guattari's claims in What is Philosophy?
(1994), Hardt & Negri underscore that in the contemporary
era, and in the context of communicative and interactive production,
the construction of concepts is not an epistemological operation
but equally an ontological project. Constructing concepts means
making exist in reality a project that is a community. The commons
is the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the
multitude (Hardt/Negri 2001: 302-303).

In spite of the highest degree of comprehensive envisioning
that Empire offers, in its systemic innovative notional
innovation of the common remains the most questionable concept.
It is recently that Toni Negri (2003) has himself recognized that
the common brings terrible confusion. There is no common before
capitalist history imposed it: which corresponds to the history
of public space; by the capacity of expressing power on individuals,
of imposing common measure on their labor. The abstract temporal
measure constitutes the common of labor.

In our world, he continues, characterized by the investment
of life by capital, production becomes the mode of an extension
of control on populations. It is in the face of this common colonization
of life that Negri talks of multitude. Today capital is parasitical
because it is no longer inside, it is outside of the creative
capacity of the multitude.

On the other side, at the same occasion, Negri started talking
about the common as a basis. It is almost impossible to define
creative labor today without starting from the common, and the
active common of labor, i.e. the common that is construed by the
co-operation of creative singularities. It is obvious that today
all institutional economists keep saying: it is external economies,
all this accumulation of intelligence; cultural exchanges that
constitute this basis of the production of value. But this basis
of the production of value is not there unless it goes through
the capacity of singularities to make it live each time as the
provision of living labor.

Co-operation itself is part of that creativity of singular
labor; singularities of and in the multitude have assumed co-operation
as a quality of their labor. Co-operation - and the common - as
an activity is anterior to capitalist accumulation; hence we have
a common that is a foundation of the economy, only in so far as
it is seen as that element of cohesion of the production of singularity
within the multitude. Examples of this, Negri adds, could be networks
and all the consequences of a definition of the common as the
phenomenology of the web.

But there is a controversial comment of Paolo Virno (2003)
on this Negri's reflection of Negri's. The category of co-operation,
he says, comes before. It is no longer inter-individual but trans-individual;
the trans-individual identifies as an intermediary zone, between
different I's, a zone between the I and the not-I. It precedes
the definition of individuals; linguistic praxis exists in between
individuals, before and independently of their fixation.

Post-Fordist productive co-operation has this transindividual
character; it is this dimension that introduces us to a reflection
on the common, Virno continues. Essentially the common was always
considered the life of the mind, it has become exterior and manifest.

Historically, in order to use this common element, you have
to get away from the life of others. The life of the mind no longer
requires a self-isolating gesture: it is the common, an immanent
form of the common.

The most surprising is Virno's observation of the drastic impoverishment,
in culture and in each of us, of the inner life. And his conclusion:
we need to think of a situation where human relations manifest
themselves as exterior things, we need to think about the things
of relations. What is common is exterior, what is common the I
outside of the I, it is trans-individual, the right-now of what
has always been.

I am not able to make a comment on this comment here and now,
as I would like. I am not prepared for that. But it seems to me
that a comparison between these two understandings of the common
concept could probably show their misconception more than an agreement.
Do they really speak of the same concept?

2. Creative labor and digital culture

Let us explore a case from real life. The number of commissioned
scientific studies and political programs on the broad topical
spectrum of "cultural economy and employment" has increased
dramatically. One among them, Exploitation and Development
of the Job Potential In the Cultural Sector in the Age of Digitalization
(Exploitation 2001), was carried out recently by sterreichische
Kulturdokumentation and several other European research institutes
and foundations. There we find an interesting observation. Both
the current discussion on the theory of culture and current policy
are characterized by two processes which seems to be independent,
but affect each other's further development. One speaks of the
"economization" of culture, on the one hand, and the
"culturalization" of economy, on the other hand (ibid.
9).

Historically, the link between the economy and culture has
long been met with scepticism or outright rejection in the European
tradition of cultural criticism. There was a general consensus
that commercial business interests and the creation of culture
and art were simply contradictory. The economic marketing of art
and culture was left to the commercial cultural industry. The
principle was clear: business is responsible for earning money,
culture for the "other side" of life - analysis, contemplation,
personal forms of expression or the provision of opportunity to
escape from commercial marketing pressures (ibid. 17).

The "economization of culture" means, we read in
this EU-Study, that economic categories are being drawn upon to
an increasing noticeable extent in the discussion and evaluation
of the cultural sphere, which, in turn, leads to the general question
of subsidy and the canons of values and selection criteria. "Culture
as commodity" and commercial cultural products were long
absent from public cultural support plans and departments. This
has changed. Pop and consumer culture has established new relationships
and semantic systems. Individualization and pluralization of lifestyles,
and "culture" as a reservoir of differences and distinctions
have further contributed to the fact that the differentiation
between high and low culture has lost much of its significance
(ibid. 18).

This is an important insight that the study brings to us. Talking
of the arts, culture and employment in the same breath reflects
the new social and economic significance of the production of
symbolic goods. The "marketization" of culture and the
"culturalization" of the market means, on the one hand,
that high culture is becoming increasingly commercial and, on
the other hand, that cultural content is increasingly shaping
commodity production (ibid. 19).

The term "creative industries" is increasingly present
in international cultural and labor market policy and discussion.
In the British mapping document (DCMS 1998), advertising, architecture,
the art and antiques market, artistic handcrafts, design, designers'
fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, performing
arts, publishing, software, TV and radio are counted among the
"creative industries".

Here we are dealing with a mixture of traditional branches
of the cultural industry with part of the telecommunications sector,
that is, the integration of new forms of production and distribution
that have arisen as a result of the digital revolution.

However, not even the term "creative industries"
has proved to be a sufficient definition for the broad spectrum
found at the intersection between the audio-visual, multimedia
and cultural industries. In order to talk about the development
of job potential, it was necessary to leave the classic, more
narrowly defined art and culture sector, and look instead for
new synergetic effects between old and new culture, the authors
of Exploitation (2001) explain. The decisive element is to focus
on the activity and its integration in the value adding chain
(ibid. 20-21).

3. Intellectual property

Within an informational paradigm, Ned Rossiter says in his
report posted on the web in September 2003, the appropriation
of labor power by capitalists does not result in a product so
much as a potential. This potential takes the "immaterial"
form of intellectual property (IP) whose value is largely unquantifiable
and is subject to the vagaries of speculative finance markets.
Thus in the case of government institutions that do not recognize
an individual's IP rights, there is nothing to "hand over"
in the first instance, that is, the right to a refusal of work
is not possible. The creative potential or work, as registered
in and transformed into the juridico-political form of IP, is
undermined by the fact that such a social relation - the hegemonic
form of legitimacy - is not recognized (ibid. 7).

What is this labor that is no longer directly exploited? -
Unexploited labor is creative labor, immaterial, concrete labor
that is expressed as such, Rossiter quotes Negri's answer to this
question. Of course exploitation is still there, but exploitation
is of the ensemble of this creation, it is exploitation that has
broken the common, i.e. abstract labor in a wage relation, and
no longer recognizes the common as a substance that is divided,
produced by abstract labor. Today capital can no longer exploit
the worker; it can only exploit co-operation amongst workers,
amongst laborers. Today capital has no longer that internal function
for which it became the soul of common labor, which produced that
abstraction within which progress was made (ibid. 11).

Capital has transmogrified, Rossiter explains, into an informational
mode of connections and relations, a mode that does not so much
come "after" industrial and post-industrial modes of
production as incorporate such modes within an ongoing logic of
flexible accumulation. Within an informational mode of connection
the creative capacity of the multitude comprises a self-generating
system in which abstract labor as a wage relation is not so much
replaced as it is given a secondary role in favor of what Andreas
Wittel (cf. 2001) terms a "network sociality".

Rossiter personally conducted the survey of which he is reporting
here. He wanted to explore in some empirical fashion the relation
between intellectual property and creative labor. There is remarkably
little attention, he observes, given by researchers and commentators
to the implications of IP in further elaborating conceptual, political
and economic models for the creative industries. All sectors of
cultural production and intellectual labor are today subject to
market economies and the tensions are evident between different
realms and the zone of indistinction. If IP is to function as
the mainstay of capital accumulation within informational economies,
it does not take much imagination to foresee industrial, legal
and political disputes focussing on the juridico-political architecture
of IP, Rossiter rightly supposes.

4. To challenge the money culture

The free and open Internet is running out of time. We are reaping
the worst of both worlds, networked chaos and monopolistic consolidation.
In other words, we are screwed. To this Rosenberg's pessimistic
conclusion Lovink (2002) responds: The presumption of the "we"
as consumers is itself a setback and points at the fading awareness
that only user empowerment, not consumer behavior, can make a
difference. Internet advocacy groups are still mainly focused
on issues related to government regulation, with a blind spot
for corporate power. The net is in need of a lively public debate
over its content and direction. It is not a parallel world, and
it is increasingly becoming less dominated by its technicalities
(ibid. 14-15).

A polarization is becoming visible between those sticking to
the outworn New Economy tales of "good capitalism" and
others, questioning the free market a priori. The critique of
globalization is not a backlash movement, as conservatives suggest.
The movements active under the "Seattle" umbrella all
have a clear blueprint for global justice and economic democracy
on offer. Opposite to the branch model there are active translocal
exchanges between a "multitude" of nodes. Being both
hacker and activist is no longer a contradiction (ibid.
17). What counts is the creation of concepts, images, and code,
while resisting both digital mythos and logos, says Geert Lovink
(ibid. 18). The digital commons, this third space in between
the state and the market, is more than a separate, well-defined
zone. A lively public net culture is always one in the making,
free of governance and agency, representing everyone and no one,
recovering a domain that never was (ibid. 19).

A booming global economy focused on the quest for short-term
profits was proving incapable of responding to increasingly urgent
ecological and human crises. Now, thanks to a surge in cross-border
information swapping, such problems are being recognized as the
local effect of a particular global ideology: one enforced by
national politicians but conceived of centrally by a handful of
corporate interests and international institutions, Naomi Klein
says (2002: xv).

We are in the midst of the first stages of an organized political
campaign to de-fetishize commodities. It's about X-raying commodity
culture, deconstructing the icons of the age of shopping and building
real global connections - among workers, students, environmentalists
- in the process (ibid. 30-31). If we are to build a broad-based
movement that challenges the money culture, we need the activism
that functions on concrete policy levels.

But it also has to go deeper, to address the cultural and human
needs created by the commodification of identity itself. It is
going to have to recognize the need for non-commodified experiences
and to reawaken our desire for truly public spaces and for the
thrill of building something collectively. The commons is being
reclaimed around the world: by media activists, by landless peasants
occupying unused land, by farmers rejecting the patenting of plants
and life forms. The activism that came to world attention in Seattle
is bursting out of its own confines, transforming itself from
a movement opposed to corporate power to one fighting for the
liberation of democracy itself, Naomi Klein strongly believes
(ibid. 33).

Exploitation... (2001). Exploitation and
Development of the Job Potential In the Cultural Sector in the
Age of Digitalization. Commissioned by European Commission,
DG Employment and Social Affairs, Final Report, presented by MKW
Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH. Munich, June 2001